me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I’m proud to announce the next

XP Days Benelux 2006

16-17 November 2006

Mechelen, Belgium

This year, even more than in previous years, we have a program that is balanced along the lines of the agile manifesto, a fairly equal dosis of individuals and interactions, working software, responding to change and customer collaboration.

Quoting xp days london, it truly is more than eXtreme programming, more than one day… Given the amount of interactive and experiential sessions I’d be more inclined to call them eXPerience Days . I’m also very happy to see a growing number of sessions around coaching, facilitation (with many highly qualified facilitators) and management. There is a mix of introductory, intermediate and advanced sessions, and we arranged the schedule so the beginning of the conference contains more introductory sessions, facilitating new participants to join more advanced sessions during the conference.

Official conference blurb follows:
XP Day Benelux is a two day international conference about agile software development, intended for software development and business people from all walks of life. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in agile software development. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.

The number of participants is limited to 120, so we can keep sessions small and highly informative.

Some photo’s from last year (you can see and read more about last year here and here) to get a flavour of what’s to come.

I see Emmanuel is puzzling on why people take pictures at conferences. I take them, not to provide people with shortcuts, but to serve my and other participants’ memories and to give people who haven’t participated in the event (or a particular session) a flavour of it, so it hopefully encourages them to come next time (and that works as I heard for instance from someone who went to the second agile open after seeing the photos from the first). As for safety, I usually ask people for permission before taking photographs, and I don’t publish the ones where people don’t look good . Most of the time, experiential sessions are lots of fun, so that gives photos of smiling, active people – I don’t think there’s many people that object to seeing a happy picture of themselves (and if they would, I’d remove it, but I never had such a request).

So I hope when people see their own picture, it helps them re-live the fun they had when doing the session.

Ron Jeffries started a new forum on agile software development.
As opposed to maling lists, I hope a forum will put a face on people (many have used photos as their avatar), give discussions a history (it is much easier to create links to searches than on the average mailing list) and collect disparate threads from hallway conversations that so far had difficulty finding a place in mailing lists (e.g. where to go next…) .